Suncatchers (16 page)

He'd have to remember all this later. This would make a great scene for some new comedy—something like
What's Up, Doc?
where the crazy heroine never did anything the normal, expected way.

“Forget something?” Belinda asked as they appeared in front of the window again.

Eldeen pulled the brown parcel out of her purse. It was a grocery bag rolled up in a clumsy tube shape and cinched tightly with several rubber bands. “I promised you a set of my pillowcases, remember?” she said. “I finished them up last night after church and then almost forgot to leave them with you.” She wedged the package inside the drawer and gave it a pat.

“Well, how nice of you, Eldeen,” Belinda said, sliding the drawer back inside and removing the parcel. “I'd forgotten all about them.”

“Well, and I bet you thought I had, too. But I was working on them all along. I put my little lamb design on them. See there? I got so tickled when I thought about it last night. Here I have been stitching that same design all my adult life and never once thought about how funny it was to be putting little lambs on a pillowcase—don't you see? You lay your head down on these little baby sheep and then
count sheep
to get to sleep!” Eldeen laughed with delight.

Perry heard a car horn from another lane. The car behind Edna Hawthorne suddenly backed up sharply and headed for the exit with a squeal of tires. Belinda held up one of the pillowcases.

“Well, now, that's the prettiest thing I've ever seen,” she said. “Thank you, Eldeen.” She stared through the glass at Eldeen with a puzzled smile. “Thank you,” she said again, looking down at the pillowcase and then out again at Eldeen. She shook her head slightly, still smiling.

“They're all ready to slip on your pillows. I washed 'em up fresh and pressed 'em for you this morning. You got to do that after you finish, see, 'cause the little design sometimes shows through, especially if all your stitches don't line up as neat as they should.” She laughed. “I'm afraid my old hands aren't as steady as they used to be.”

“Oh, Eldeen, I can't believe you did this for me,” Belinda said. “You're just a jewel.” She waved as they began backing up again.

“That's my daughter's name—Jewel!” Eldeen called. She turned to Perry, her face puckered with pleasure. “I think she liked 'em real fine, don't you? She's got lots of personal problems, Belinda does. But doesn't the whole world?” She sighed and then waved suddenly toward the parking area to their right. “Would you swing in there and stop a minute?” she said. At this rate they should get home by midnight, Perry thought. But he didn't mind really. The thought of writing this afternoon made him weary.

He backed into a space at the end of the small parking lot but left the motor running. What was Eldeen intending to do? he wondered. Go inside the bank to follow up on her conversation with Belinda? Flag down Edna for a chat? Count her money? That was always a good idea. He'd discovered errors more than once by doing that. He glanced sideways at Eldeen and saw her with her eyes closed once again. Her forehead was deeply furrowed, and her eyebrows formed a thick, shaggy ridge. Her lips moved slightly, and she exhaled a soft moan. Perry turned and looked out his window. Edna Hawthorne was driving by slowly. Levi was licking an orange sucker and staring somberly at Perry. Why couldn't Eldeen have her prayer session while they rode along? Perry thought impatiently. Why had she asked him to stop and park? He depressed the accelerator a little and raced the motor.

Eldeen raised her head and set her mouth in a firm line before speaking. “I've been waiting for the right moment for this, and I feel like it's high time,” she said at last. She turned to look at Perry, and he was surprised to see her eyes moist with tears. A sudden feeling of dread and panic seized him. What was happening? Was she going to divulge some painful secret? Was he going to be asked to comfort her in some way? He wished intensely that they were at Wal-Mart now amid the bright fluorescent lights and shiny floors, the neat shelves of merchandise and crowds of people, the friendly salesclerks in their blue smocks.

As soon as she started speaking, Perry realized that this was what Cal had meant when he had said, “They'll come after you before long.” Too bad he had neglected to get his answers ready, as Cal had urged.

Eldeen didn't slide up to the subject sideways. She looked Perry directly in the eye and asked, “Have you been born again, Perry?”

He looked over at her swiftly, then turned back to look out his window. Why hadn't he planned something to say? He ought to have known his turn was coming. She went after everybody else. What had made him think he'd escape? He felt as ill prepared as people who were bowled over by some disaster and afterward testified, “I always thought it happened to other people. I never thought it would happen to
me
.” It set Perry back to think of himself as
involved
in this whole scenario. He'd been with Eldeen a number of times now but had never seen himself as part of the play. He was merely a spectator, as always, observing and recording—invisible. He never thought of himself as arousing her concern—being on the same level as, say, Mr. Hammond or Flo or Belinda. He looked back at Eldeen, who was still searching his face. He was trapped. He would have to say something.

She looked dismayed at his silence. “Oh, Perry, I've just prayed and prayed that I'd do this right. It's not like me to hold off this long, but I could tell right off the bat the first time I met you that you had a heavy weight of trouble on your heart, and I just didn't think you were ready yet to be spoken to about the Gospel, although you know it's really during the low, low times of life that we need Jesus the most.”

“I know,” he said. It wasn't at all what he meant to say or what needed to be said.

“Beth told us, naturally, about your wife and the divorce and all, and I know that's got to just hurt so deep, especially having a little boy like Beth said you had . . . you must be so lonesome. But Jesus can take your burdens and help you carry them, Perry. He can wash away your sins and give you joy in your heart. That's a
fact
.”

Perry watched with wonder as she leaned toward him, her head to one side, her bright eyes glistening, her wrinkled face sagging with the weight of his sorrow. He wondered as he looked at her if he had ever been the subject of one of her conversations. Did she really pray for him specifically? Did she really spend time thinking about him?

“You've been so good to go to church with us,” Eldeen continued. “And we've all talked about how unusual it is since we never could persuade Beth to come with us, not even once. But it's kinda like Joe Leonard said last night after we got home. He said to Jewel, ‘You know, Mama, I get the feeling Perry's just coming to church with us to be nice to us, 'cause he's afraid it'd be rude to say no.' And then Jewel, she said, ‘Well, seems like to me he's really and truly
interested
, but only in the way a newspaper man's interested in a train wreck or some criminal's execution. Like we're some kind of a curiosity he's investigating.' That's what Jewel said.”

So he
was
a topic of conversation after all. How odd. He had never thought of these people discussing him, wondering about his motives. He was amazed at Joe Leonard's and Jewel's assessment of his church attendance. They were both partly right, of course. He
had
felt it would be impolite to refuse their offer of a ride, even though he really would prefer at times going alone, and his interest was indeed like that of a reporter. He had been so smug, thinking of himself as an unnoticed observer, almost as unobtrusive as a piece of furniture, but he had been seen and judged plainly for what he was by the small-town mentality of a fourteen-year-old boy and his mother.

“Well, it's a different situation, all right,” he said lamely. He wasn't even sure exactly what he was talking about. Everything during the past months had been a different situation.

“It's just got to be,” Eldeen said sympathetically. “Being all by yourself down here away from your family and all your friends.”

All his friends. That was a laugh. He'd never been much of an attractor of friends. Cal was probably the closest thing he had to a real friend, and their relationship was mostly business related and mostly by telephone. But then men weren't as big on friendship as women. As long as he had known her, Dinah had gathered friends easily, like flowers from a garden. She was drawn to colorful, dominant, well-groomed types, and rarely did she ever discard a friend. She just kept adding them. She had whole bouquets of them. Perry envisioned her now, surrounded by her beautiful, fragrant friends, all laughing and talking at once. No one would ever pity Dinah for being lonesome, that was certain.

Eldeen laid her hand on his arm. Perry looked down at it, marveling again at its largeness. He wondered if she had to buy men's gloves.

“I just felt this morning after I came over,” Eldeen said, “that maybe it was time I asked you about being saved. It dawned on me all of a suddenlike that if something happened to you—like a tragic car accident or a heart attack or something really serious like that—that you might be
dead
before I'd talked to you about your soul. And then wouldn't I feel just terrible?” Her face took on an expression of extreme horror. “And wouldn't it just be the awfulest thing for
you
, having to face eternity without Jesus?”

Perry opened his mouth to say something but realized he had no idea how to answer. Cars were still pulling through the bank in a slow procession. The serious looks on the faces of the drivers as they passed reminded Perry of a funeral. And in a sense it was a funeral, he thought. Every single one of these people, from the youngest to the oldest, from Levi Hawthorne to Eldeen, was moving closer and closer to death. They might be clutching a fistful of money now as they drove by, but sooner or later their hands would fall limp, and the money would flutter to the floor. He thought of the famous lines from
Macbeth
: “Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow.”

Perry inhaled sharply. These people were getting to him. How morbid. He remembered a time when death never used to cross his mind. Now here he was, coming up with thoughts like something Brother Hawthorne would say in a sermon. No doubt the pastor
had
said something like that.

Growing old had only recently, in the past year or two, become a personal threat for Perry. He often thought of how close to forty he was, then would come fifty, then sixty. In less time than it took to strike a match, he would be Eldeen's age. He thought now of Brother Hawthorne's words at church the day before. “Time is fleeting. Our life is but a vapor. Soon you'll be a year older, then five, then ten, then twenty, then thirty.”

Eldeen had leaned over to Perry in the pew and said, “Not me! I'll be dead and buried and in heaven singing the hymns of Zion long before that!”

Brother Hawthorne had gone on to describe for the congregation the picture of a deceased celebrity he had seen on the news recently. “They showed film clips of her in her youth,” he had said, “and, I know Edna will forgive me for saying this, but she was truly lovely—flawless skin, shining hair, slender form, light voice, graceful movements. Then they showed a picture of her that some persistent photographer had taken five days ago as she was helped from her car into the hospital. This vision of loveliness had somehow turned into an obese, haggard, wrinkled old woman with a tangled bird's nest of hair. And I was reminded of the poet's words, ‘Whatever is begotten and born, dies.'” Well, Perry had thought, that wasn't exactly the way Yeats had said it, but it was close, and anyway, the meaning was the same.

Perry looked down again at Eldeen's hand on his arm. He tried to imagine what it must have looked like sixty years ago. They must have been sitting in silence for a full minute before Eldeen spoke again.

“I'm not going to be pushy, I promise, but do you mind if I pray out loud for you before we go on our way to Wal-Mart?”

When Perry nodded, she pressed his arm more firmly and squeezed her eyes tightly shut before beginning.

And there in the parking lot of First Carolina Union Bank in the middle of a windy February afternoon, Perry heard Eldeen pray specifically for him. He counted eighteen times that she said his name.

11

The Sounds of Supper

“Uh-oh,” Eldeen said as they pulled into the driveway two hours later. “Jewel's home already. I was afraid this was going to happen when we ran into so many snags in Wal-Mart.”

Perry wondered if it occurred to her that all the “snags” at Wal-Mart had been of her own doing—things like asking the elderly door-greeter in charge of offering shopping carts how his trip to Mississippi had gone and then quizzing him for ten minutes about every detail of his son's new job in a Schwinn bicycle factory. Later she had debated at length over which paper party cups were prettiest and even stopped several shoppers—total strangers—to ask their opinion. She couldn't decide whether to get neon-colored birthday candles or pastel ones, so she ended up getting a box of each. The same thing happened with the Hi-C, and she finally got two large bottles of each of the three flavors. Then she dug through a sale bin of discontinued kitchen utensils they passed, explaining to Perry the variety of ways in which each one could be used before she settled on a large plastic spatula because “You just never can have enough spatulas.”

When they finally made it to the check-out line, she suddenly remembered that she needed some pink embroidery thread, and when they went back to find it, she spied a display of suncatchers and stopped to choose one—a bright yellow tulip—to give Jewel for her birthday. On the way back she saw a clearance shelf of Valentine candy, and she stopped to exclaim over the half-price bags of conversation hearts, informing Perry that she had always “been partial to these little things—used to practically make myself
sick
eating so many of them.” She put two bags of them in the cart, then added a third and started telling Perry about all the things she stored in the freezer until she was ready to use them.